Passenger Pigeon

www.wbu.com/chipperwoods/photos/passpigeon.htm

www.wisconsinhistory.org/whi/feature/passengerpigeons/

Page 192 ~ EXCERPT FROM “THE WORLD WITHOUT US” ~ Alan Weisman

Long before we had poultry factories to mass produce chicken breasts by billion, nature did much the same for us in the form of the North American passenger pigeon. By anyone’s estimate, it was the most abundant bird on Earth. Its flocks, 300 miles long and numbering in the billions, spanned horizons fore and aft, actually darkening the sky. Hours could go by, and it was as though they hadn’t passed at all, because they kept coming. Larger, far more striking than the ignoble pigeons that soil our sidewalks and statuary, these were dusky, blue, rose breasted, and apparently delicious.

Thy are un unimaginable quantities of acorns, beechnuts and berries. One of the ways we slew them was by cutting their food supply, as we sheared forests from eastern plains of the United States to plant our own food. The other was with shotguns, spraying lead pellet that could down dozens with a single blast. After 1850, with most of the heartland forest gone to farms, hunting passenger pigeons was even easier, as millions of them roosted together in the remaining trees. Boxcars stuffed with them arrived daily in New York and Boston. When it finally became apparent that their unthinkable numbers were actually dropping, a kind of madness drove hunters to slaughter them even faster while they were still there to kill. By 1900, it was iver. A miserable few remained caged in a Cincinnati zoo, and by the time zookeepers realized what they had, nothing could be done. The last one died before their eyes in 1914.

In the succeeding years, the parable of the passenger pigeon was retold often, but its moral could only be heeded in part. A conservative moment founded by hunters themselves, Ducks Unlimited, has bought millions of acres of marshland to insure that no game species they value will be without places to land and breed. However, in a century in which humans proved more inventive than during the rest of Homo sapiens history combined, protecting life on the wing became more complicated than simply making game-bird hunting sustainable.

Walking farther, behind the NGS machines {What is NGS? Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a massively parallel sequencing technology that offers ultra-high throughput, scalability, and speed. The technology is used to determine the order of nucleotides in entire genomes or targeted regions of DNA or RNA.} that have heralded a new era in genetics, there is an array of sculptures and photos of various animals accompanied by museum style placards. Under each animal, details are given about their extinction. Effectively, this is a “de-extinction road map,” which aims to bring each of the creatures (such as passenger pigeons) back from the dead, but as healthy as, or healthier than, before -- not as zombies. While these goals are difficult, and potentially peculiar to some, the road map posits that we can get back most of the creatures that we have lost. At the time of writing, there are none, but it is possible that by 2040 we may have not just one but several species resurrected from extinction and walking around earth. ~ Page 86